So I've been playing Blood 2.

Let's say, to start, that I did not like it. The first game wasn't exactly a Sunday picnic, but even it had more decency and self-respect than this.

Now, I liked the first Blood. It wasn't perfect by any means, and it was still pretty damn dark, but it at least presented itself fairly genuinely. It tried to make a spooky atmosphere, provide gory gunplay, tell a dark and somewhat brooding story and basically give the player a good time on the dark side. Caleb was still an absurd construct, but one that you could at least respect as meaning the things he said, his jokes and references often coming across more like the muttered ramblings of a sinister crazy man than simple pop culture.

The Caleb of Blood 2 takes the same concepts and turns up the evil factor to 11. Whatever miniscule shred of justification Blood 1's Caleb had is shed. Pointlessness isn't merely a fault, but a theme. This Caleb is so trying, so dollar store that he may as well have been voiced by the writer and travel via rocket skates. This Caleb, for whatever strange mixture of internalized factors, I just cannot take seriously. Part of it may be that he can't seem to, either.

Blood 2 seems to see the world through a very dirty lens. Everyone in the game is presented as some combination of passively worthless or actively evil, either a stupid plebe whinging about their petty and ultimately meaningless day-to-day concerns or the freely volunteered and self-defeating admissions of misconduct on the part of CabalCo. There is no one to root for, because what's the point? Everyone's a whiny, ignorant loser whose life is going nowhere. Who the hell cares if a few get killed? Hell, let's kill all of them! What difference does it make other than that are a few idiots less in the world?

The plot and the characters who deliver it are treated effectively as unessential gibbering; everyone who has something to say about anything Caleb or the player might care about is dismissed as a deluded ditherer. The game is not merely incapable of having a story one can care about, but is actively working against it, trying its hardest to keep things in the sour spot of wanton, uncaring violence.

The fact that it's set in the quasi-realistic near-future makes it seem all the more a statement on our modern world, or something trying to look like a statement to lend itself cred, fraught with assumptions on the attitudes of the player. This games show us and expects from us the perspective of one severely depressed, someone so overwhelmed by disappointment and bitterness that they can no longer see anything of value in life, including-- indeed, especially-- their fellow human beings. The sheer amount of celebration the game heaps upon mass murder (particularly of innocent bystanders), intended as some kind of goad for Teh Hardcorez among the game-playing population who just want loads of violence out of their game, instead comes across as the resentful rant of someone who simply does not have the strength to go on, someone who has given up and no longer cares and just wants to watch the world burn. I can barely see the immature petulance of the self-assured gory shooter for the veneer what looks uncomfortably like homicidal depression. That's not what it actually is, at least as far as I can tell, but it looks too much like it for comfort or taste, and seeing it couched in fakey 90's Gamertude this way is just unpleasant on a number of levels.

That the game's visuals are composed of shite LithTech 3D graphics, and that the engine is horribly buggy and crashes continually, and that half of Caleb's lines are recycled wholesale from the first game, among other carelessnesses, only compounds the sense of apathy; one gets the sense that nobody who worked on this game cared about it, and that its nihilistic story and awful characters are expressions of their own feelings. There has been no recapturing of magic, no continuation of a saga; only a horrible, foul-smelling mess made out of whatever was left over from before.

En bref: Blood 2 is just a sack of old sacks.

Getting Quick and Dirty for PbP

So, focusing my attention on things unrelated to Gor and/or Gor accessories, I recently tried my hand at hacking together an RPG system that would work well in PbP. Because I seriously wanted to play some Black Crusade and PbP is how I game. The result of smashing bits of Toon, D6, Fate and Maid together resulted in something that... is actually a lot like Risus, which I shamefully admit I didn't know anything about at the time. That said, there's a couple differences, and I'd like to think they're good and legit differences, and either way I'm pretty pleased with the result.

Here's how it goes:

1. Define Beliefs and Goals (just like you'd do in Toon). Describe your character's looks while you're at it.
2. Take 18D6 (or whatever you think is fair for what you're doing) and just make up some abilities to put them in. Traits, skills, attributes, equipment, spells, whatevs. Just be descriptive about what it is and what it's good for.
3. Roll any remaining dice for your Hits.

Conflict res: for combat, two guys roll whatever ability makes sense in context, highest number wins, loser takes the difference as damage. Same goes for all other conflicts or tests, just with a situational DC and the damage part replaced with successfully fixing the life sustainer or requisitioning a heavy stubber or learning the Lord Inquisitor's mother's maiden name or whatever y'got.

That's it.

I've already gotten a bit of positive feedback on this, and I'm planning to use it in a Black Crusade PbP I'm trying to get together on RPGnet. If that pans out, I'll probably post more about how it's worked out and what could be done better.

Why Gor is Pure Evil

"Men, you should understand,” he said, “are lustful and possessive. You may like this or not, but it is the way they are. Those who do not seem so are glandular defectives, less than men, or are liars and hypocrites. Any man who truly desires a woman, who truly wants a woman, who wants her in the robust, vigorous fullness of powerful masculine desire, wants her wholly, all of her, wants to possess her, totally, wants to have her all to himself, wants to literally own her. Thus, what a man wants in a woman is the most precious, coveted and treasured of all possessions, the female slave."
-- Mirus, Prize of Gor

"In any event, Ellen was not discontented in her collar. It belongs on me, she thought. And I love it! I belong in a collar! I love it! I love it!"
-- Ellen, Prize of Gor

---

I'm just a no-name blogger who posts once a season. Let's face it; nobody ever reads this thing. But on the off chance that someone does, that someone looks at this blog and sees this post, I ask that you hear me out. Read what I have to say.

It's been months since I last even attempted to write about Gor in any analytical capacity. I managed to make it through the first three books. I've tried to read the fourth, but choked on it, and then just skimmed around randomly in the series. I've written thousands of words as part of various attempts to review those early books, but I'm no longer sure I'll ever finish them or post them if I do.

The Gor series is like a fractal. The text of it occupies a finite space, but the concepts it develops are one-dimensionally infinite. Words cannot convey the full depth of that infinite spiral of hateful, ignorant offal, and yet here I am, tasked by myself to try.

Let me be clear: I do not want to lay accusation upon the author, but in a case like this, it's difficult not to do so. The sheer volume of this body of work, consistent, deliberate and pointed, looks to me like a labor of... not love, but a fetishistic enjoyment. The intimate, prolonged descriptions of the specifics of female slavery and male dominance speak of powerful excitement, unthinking, quick and intense. It's philosophy delivered with the sweaty stroke of pornography, and it is a belief system so superloaded with grievous proclamations-- for so often they are not even implied, but stated-- that this kind of impassioned mishandling can only result in a meltdown, intentional or not.

(If we do want to lay blame upon John Norman, however, there are uncounted sources of quotes from his various conversations, interviews and convention appearances. Please, do look those up to lend more perspective to his writing.)

Further, it's getting worse. Every book is worse than the one it proceeds, even if only by the simple value that there is now more Gor in the world than there was before, that tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of new words have been written to describe it to yet another savage level of granularity. It's been said by many others that the series does enter a decline a certain number of books in, and this has been my experience. To be specific, the books gradually shed their science fantasy or pulp barbarian adventure skins and dedicate themselves wholly to the explicitly misogynist porn. If you liked the early installments of Gor for whatever Robert E. Howard/Edgar Rice Burroughs tenor they might possess, little to none of that remains in later books, at least not without being so deeply stained with what I can only call "antifeminism" as to be worthless as entertainment.

Now, don't get me wrong. Every book is bad. I am talking about a steaming, bubbling canyon of superheated woman-shaming, the rigid walls containing it comprised of the most twistingly horrendous writing this side of Eye of Argon (and really, the lousiness of the writing in these books is worth of an article unto itself, but I've got bigger fish to fry at the moment). The first handful I give the typical pass if only because other things happened in them, and the narration found other foci, even if only for a while. The third book I would call both the best and the worst of that set, in that it both focuses the most on strange othernesses, like exploring the nature of the Priest-Kings, while also making the most powerful declarations of the fact of the True Man and Woman up to that point.

Let me give you some examples of what we're dealing with here.

Look at Tharna in Outlaw of Gor, the second book. The city is ruled by blatant "feminist" strawwomen in burqas and silver masks, who have sent many of their men, and countless others entrapped from other cities, to work in the mines. Tarl-- the hero of the entire series and star of nearly every book-- is sent to join them. He reawakens their male nature, and they rebel, escaping the mines in a filthy bloodbath. That's an important fact here; these men have only just escaped from years of back-breaking slavery, trapped underground, starving, routinely whipped and constantly chained. The moment they return to their city, they begin systematically enslaving every woman there, not even as part of revenge, but out of the sudden realization that this was how it should have been all along, and the reason for all their suffering. Every one of these thousands of men kidnaps a woman-- under the rejoicing edict of their queen, herself bought as a slave by Tarl and her eyes opened to the true place of men and women-- stripping them, putting them in chains and dragging them kicking and screaming back to their home for a life of rape, beatings, imprisonment and starvation. The narrative treats this entire bloody civil uprising, resulting in mass kidnapping, rape and imprisonment, as a joyous, festive affirmation of life and a happy ending to a bold adventure.

Look at Ellen in Prize of Gor. Ellen is the fifty-year-old victim of a literal alien abduction, flying saucer and all-- just one of thousands of people taken from Earth, a process that happens with incredible frequency and disturbing efficiency. She is kidnapped from her home and taken to Gor, where she is injected with chemicals to make her young and "beautiful" (again, something done to, presumably, everyone on Gor). She is taken to a slave market and sold to a man, who all but drags by her hair back to his house to be stripped naked, manacled to a wall and raped repeatedly, a routine intended to last for the rest of her life-- a very long time indeed given the potions of youth and longevity that can be purchased in virtually any shop on the planet. She loves being a slave so much that simply not being allowed to speak excites her sexually, despite there being absolutely no sane reason for her to feel anything but misery and loathing for her captors. There is no brainwashing involved, nor was Ellen raised on Gor and thus would not have received the indoctrinations given to Gorean children.

Look at... well, all of Mariner of Gor. The first three pages of chapter 19 of Mariners, the 30th book in the series and the most recent as of this writing that I know of, consists almost entirely of Tarl Cabot rhapsodizing in narration about how the true sexual passion of a woman can only be awakened once she has been collared, chained and bound to the servitude of a man-- all while a group of slave girls dump chamber pots over the side of the ship, a duty they fought with one another over just so they could get some fresh air.

That one was just weird.

Again, none of this is played for horror or disgust. This is perhaps the single most important fact to keep in mind going into these books. At no point do the books consider these things horrifying, disturbing or even objectionable. In fact, many times it talks about the abject suffering of women as quite a positive thing, necessary for their emotional growth and freedom. Three-quarters of the text of Prize is Ellen being described and spoken to as if she were side of beef at a meat market, measuring her personal value in her sale price and taking pleasure in the devices and markings used to identify and prepare her as a slave. Almost immediately, Ellen begins doing this as well, to herself. There is a prolonged inner monologue in Ellen's head as she kneels at her master's feet, wrestling with herself about how she must never let him know just how mind-blowingly turned on she is by kneeling, and being chained, and being demeaned, beaten, called a slut, and a dozen other things. This man bought her with money, forced her into slavery, and she has fallen desperately in love with him, pretending to hate the things he's doing to her to protect his feelings.

Even if the author meant nothing by these passages, even if the message they convey was intended only to apply to the world he fabricated, the presentation of these passages leaves ample room for doubt on that point. Even if we assume he did not intend anything by his words, even in context we get the frightful perception that these words are frankly, unabashedly sincere, and directed squarely at the real world.

I've searched online looking for other people who also take serious issue with Gor. I've found surprisingly little, though maybe I've looked in the wrong places, or used search terms that were too narrow. So many people seem to focus on the Gor lifestylers, or the Gorean Second Life scene, complaining about the behavior of people who have based their games or even their lives around the books without paying much or any mind to the books that started it all in the first place. It seems to me that people hear the reputation of the Gor books-- that they're sexist and full of bondage porn-- then avoid them for those reasons.

This, I think, is a bad thing. Ignoring the books and their contents is the last thing we should do. Exposure is our only tool for developing an understanding and opening a dialogue. Otherwise, they will just sit there being horrible, and nothing will have changed, and no one will be the wiser.

Let's try a little thought experiment. Imagine the following: a group of aliens go to Africa, abduct thousands of Africans and transport them to another planet where they are made slaves. They also abduct a sizable number of white people, to be masters of the slaves. Through all this, they teach these people-- and their eventual children, and their children's children-- at great length that white people are biologically disposed to be masters, and black people to be slaves, and that not only do both suffer and experience a decline of health and morality when deprived of this specific master-slave relationship for any length of time, but that true happiness-- indeed, happiness of any kind-- is found solely within that relationship. And once this has been sufficiently drilled in, the masters and even the slaves take up these teachings, preaching and reinforcing these beliefs for one another.

Yes, I know that's a tired analogy, and it has its flaws, but it's all I got, and it probably still isn't enough.

Gor is rape culture cubed and delivered intravenously. We do not have any single word for this level of meditated gender-essentialist extra-sexual narrative malfunction. And as monstrous as these books are, I will not tell you not to read them. On the contrary, these books have to be seen to be believed, to be understood, and I recommend them to anyone-- everyone, in fact. When it comes to Gor, and talking about the issues it represents, nothing should be left to the imagination. Make no assumptions, do not take others' word for it-- including mine-- and do not argue. Just get ahold of any one of them, several if you can, and read them, front to back. Then judge for yourself, and talk about it.

That's all I ask.

---

For those who do not appreciate or care for subtlety or verbose argument, to give you a rough idea of where I'm coming from, I am holding a stack of Gor novels and doing this.

...I'm going to have an ulcer in my brainstem before this is over.

---

Some further reading.

The official Gor site.

Luther's Gorean Scrolls.

David Langford: The Kink in Space.

Hathor Legacy review of Witness of Gor.

And for some counterbalance, T. L. Ryder on Gor and hate speech.

Gor Summary, En Bref

I am only slightly exaggerating. The third book did me in. Chairs.

A more detailed and perhaps less apoplectic analysis shall follow once I adequately recoup my sensibilities.

So I've been reading Gor...

Not long ago, I found myself getting into the work of Robert Howard, namely the Conan stories. After reading some of those and finding myself enjoying them, John Norman's Gorean saga was suggested to me as being similar stuff. As of this post, I've read the first two books-- Tarnsman of Gor and Outlaw of Gor, to be exact.

How do I describe it? I am both surprised, and yet not surprised at all.

I went into Gor knowing that it contained some... less than egalitarian elements. I knew that, and yet, when I came across them, I found myself astonied by them. Never have I seen such a bold and unashamed exposition of a sexually charged patriarchal society-- and I read fetish fiction. It's just so frank, so unabashedly matter of fact, reinforced all the while by the nagging knowledge that this is not merely the spank fantasy of a dirty old man cut of an older world's coarse cloth-- the proceedings are his philosophy, a way of life in action that he esteems most highly in the face of an equality-seeking world. The only thing I can compare it to is F.A.T.A.L.-- an obnoxious, faltering garage band to John Norman's sweeping philharmonic.

I figure for thoroughness's sake I'll do detailed reviews of the first few books at least (I've already got a few thousand words written up on the two I've read), but it's a daunting task-- there's over thirty of the damn things, with more coming later this year if they haven't already, and let's face it, these raunchy tomes have quite probably been dissected more smartly and to deeper depths than I could ever manage.

Still, it'd probably be more entertaining than reviewing the Ultramarines movie. I'll get to that one soon enough.

Ixion Watches First Blood

Let me get one thing straight: I got the wrong impression of this movie, and of the Rambo character. I had the osmotic impression of a heavily-armed hero, a man of righteous action, delivering justice to the forces of evil in the form of automatic gunfire.

Frankly, I don't know where I got that impression anymore. The film supported it only awkwardly at first, then fell through as we see the poignant sympathy with which the victimized small-town cops are portrayed. Rambo's tearful breakdown at the film's climax smashed that impression like a wrecking ball. This man was not a hero, but a tragic victim-- a living, breathing human being transformed into a weapon and unable to turn himself back.

I find it sad that this character, it now seems, has been so myopically Flanderized into nothing but a scowling, M60-brandishing slab of man-meat, forgetting entirely the powerfully delivered message by the film. I don't know who's fault it is, if it's anyone's-- having not yet seen the later films, it may be that the sequels are themselves to blame. Peering through the foggy glass of the accumulated stereotype overlaid upon the facts, we find ourselves cheering and rooting for the very warlike force that the film so pointedly expresses the bitter tragedy of-- egging on the broken soldier for the gratification of the crowd. It's an uncomfortable feeling, I find.

I liked this movie a lot more than I was expecting to, and for entirely different reasons than I'd anticipated. It took all the guns-blazing action, all the gore and violence, and made it mean something-- the only thing it could realistically mean-- and I love it for that. See it if you haven't. If you have, see it again. It's good stuff.

On the ever effervescent topic of the undead

You know, I just realized something the other day. Zombies are boring.

I can think of three just core purposes for zombies that seem to get used in everything in one capacity or another:

1. Mass numbers of sluggish, mindless targets for spectacularly gory slaughter
2. Widespread disaster creating a chaotic, lawless environment fostering survivor camaraderie and rampant looting
3. Roundabout social commentary on the uniformity of post-industrial society or some such fartsy folderol

Now, there's nothing stopping anybody from taking the concept in other directions, but even the freshest take on the shuffling (or running, or crawling) dead is still spreading perfectly good dressing on a cut of veal dating from the Persian Gulf War-- you can lay it on by the pine box, but it's still old meat, and no amount of thousand island can mask the smell, nor save your dinner guests from nasty stomach bugs.

I think it's representative of a larger problem. Zombies, despite not being a terribly good idea anymore, still seem to have a lot of clout, being a well-understood and accepted staple of video games and movies. But take away their rotting infectious exteriors and slap on some dollar store shades and you're left with generic mooks, no better than humanoid goombas-- not people, but cardboard targets for an actual character to kill en masse without guilt or hesitation (assuming your action hero is an actual character and not just as cardboard as everything else he meets).

So many "action" pieces rely on this by their very nature-- the faceless, soulless nobodies that The Hero fells like so many bottles lined up on a fence. Every video game comes packaged with an infinite supply of them just so the player has something to do, just as every movie provides an ample pile for whenever the writers bow their heads and admit to themselves they're writing "action" and toss in another fight scene. Many works will try to characterize their masses in some way, maybe making them an alien race or magical constructs or amok robots or something dumber than any of those, making up their own rules for them or recycling some existing monstrous mythos, but it's all the same, really.

There is nothing beyond that festering single-celled nucleus to define the zombie, and as a result they can only serve the one function-- cardboard target, even if they're presented as being more menacing in the abstract way and causing some kind of worldwide cataclysm that severs phone connections and downs power lines with its mere existence.

I never got that, either; why is it when zombies invade, suddenly the city looks like its been carpet bombed? There are usually craters and collapsed buildings and unchecked fires and damaged infrastructure. I know it's supposed to suggest collateral damage from people suddenly going all funny in the head during whatever important industrial task they were engaged in at the time, but you'd think the shambling hordes all received C4 charges as free gifts instantly upon zombification.

In conclusion, I'm tired of zombies, but more than that, I'm tired of ready-made slaughterable throngs of uniform bad guys that exist only to get killed with chainsaws duct-taped to lawnmowers or make an implausibly oversized mess for less dead characters to try and worm their way out of through trench camaraderie and the plundering of shopping malls.

And don't even get me started on warrior races.

A Grey Outlook

This article was written based on Warhammer 40,000 Codex: Grey Knights 5th Edition and Warhammer 40,000 Codex: Daemonhunters 3rd Edition.

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Imagine that if in Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles, everyone on the French front was fighting and dying at Bingo Crepescule-- except for Manech and his comrades, who all had full modern-day flak armor and miniguns, decimating the German line and then vanishing into thin air. And then the rest of the regiment was sent to the firing squad for having even seen it at all.

That's the Grey Knights.

Warhammer 40,000 is known for extremes, mess-making and sometimes outright shameless stupidity for fun's sake, but the GKs are playing an entirely different game, one in which only they matter. To enjoy Space Marines, one must believe that their conflicts have some effect, however minor and however temporary. The Grey Knights hog that spotlight, devaluing the efforts of lesser factions, a power-armored finger in every pot. What makes it even worse is that there is nary a trace of the Grey Knights' influence on the world; they're fighting the Most Important Battles in the Universe, but win or lose, nothing changes for better or worse. Granted, that's a problem the setting suffers from in general, but the Grey Knights are an especially pronounced example of it in action.

Let us reflect for a moment upon the Warhammer 40,000 fandom's frequent hatred of Matthew Ward. This is something I knew about going in when I first got a look at the Grey Knights 5th edition codex. I'd heard the stories, the anecdotes and of course the fathomless, thrumbling fanrage. A part of me gave it credence and another part didn't; my expectations for it weren't high, and ultimately I just wanted to see if it really was as bad as I'd heard.

Not halfway through the fluff I found myself disgusted, my tongue curled in tangible revulsion at the contents. Here lies the bad fanfic, the enthused but callow young fan, not yet jaded or seasoned, absorbed in the forming opulence of his precious custom Space Marines made all by him. They have all the best, and ignore the worst. This is the inability to not see the whole picture, to myopically emphasize only this new thing and to forget that there was ever a setting beyond the pieces that are useful in that thing's decoration. The setting and that thing do not need one another.

Now, I want to be entirely clear on this. I have read both Grey Knights 5th and Daemonhunters 3rd. While the inclination to blame Ward came strong at first from the reading of the former, perusal of the latter dispelled the notion of his sole blame. Daemonhunters 3rd edition is as bad and perhaps even worse than the 5th edition army book, and Matt Ward's name does not appear in its credits; DH 3rd features almost exactly the same fluff, sometimes almost to the word as GK 5th, so ultimately I can't pin this one on Ward-- they really were this bad, right out of the hexagrammic gate.

That said, Ward still wrote the Bloodtide event in GK 5th, so he's not getting off clean. More on that later.

Let's take the rest by point.

The Grey Knights:

- have all the best equipment.
Where other Chapters have very few suits of Terminator armor, usually just enough to outfit the 1st Company properly, almost the entire Grey Knights Chapter consists of Terminators. They all have Nemesis Force weapons, which are like normal force weapons, but better. Every single one of them has a storm bolter. Every single one of them has a copy of the Liber Daemonica.

- have tons and tons of incredibly rare and world-shakingly important artifacts and relics.
A book containing everything there is to know on daemons. A vial of the Emperor's tears. The biggest evil in the known universe entombed on their fortress-world. The Terminus Decree.

- are all psykers and sorcerers, but never suffer any ill effects from either.
This more than anything speaks to the shameless Sueness of the Grey Knights. It, and by extension their immunity to Chaos corruption, effectively breaks the setting.

- are, without question, "better" than all other Space Marines.

There's just something about the Grey Knights that rubs me the wrong way. Compare to the Ultramarines, who are oft accused of being the subjects of fanwank, or the Blood Angels, or less-talked about chapters like the Imperial Fists or Salamanders, or any of the tens of nobody Chapters, or even Space Marines as a whole. No one of those gets hyped this bad.

The problem with this kind of self-oneupsmanship is that every iteration reduces the value of what came before, and in order to hold the note, something else must inevitably replace the replacement, creating an ever-growing upside-down pyramid of excess only for the sake of pushing the limits.

Do they get the joke? Have they forgotten the joke? Are they the joke? It's hard to say for sure. If they are the joke, they have no punchline, at least not yet. But if they did, I could let the matter drop, as they would suddenly make sense. It would take something deprecating to take the hot air out of them-- like some or all of their Super Powerful Artifacts of Vagueness being useless trinkets, and this being the reason they don't let anyone see them.

Consider the way in which the Crimson Fists once one-shotted half of their Chapter by putting in the wrong coordinates for a missile. It's a tragedy with comic roots; black humor of the kind Warhammer 40,000 understands and has ample room for.
The problem is Space Marines, who are actually kind of hard to find funny. And it doesn't help that GW keeps trying to depict them as more and more flawless. They would make excellent pompous fall-guys, but that doesn't seem to be how it goes.

If you can enjoy them on face value, the up-to-elevenness of Warhammer 40,000 just makes it cooler. I can understand this; I've felt it myself. There are some days when I really can believe that The Emperor Protects. But sometimes believing that makes it too hard to stomach certain other parts of the setting, which are too bad to be fun for anyone. Some parts I can enjoy unironically. Other parts have to be a joke for me because otherwise they're no fun, or even actively depressing. They Grey Knights don't fit into this; they're a bad part that needs to be a joke, but refuses to do so.

---

Let's talk about 876.M41: The Bloodtide Returns. In the now-infamous battle writeup from Grey Knights 5th, and the root of much fanrage.

Taking out the part where some of the Sisters are corrupted on contact would help. Have them fight and die in a straight combat against demonic enemies, and have their martyrdom become the talisman of protection. Having a Sister around to offer the Grey Knights their blood as a blessing would help too, so it's not just "hey a bunch of dead Sisters lets take all the blood". Turn it from just a bunch of senseless gory death into a meaningful sacrifice.
And give the Sisters their due credit, since without them and their sacrifice, victory against the Bloodtide would have been impossible for the Grey Knights.

Then there's the fact that they didn't consent to this. The Sisters didn't commit any sins (beyond being abstractly "corrupted" by the Bloodtide) or otherwise do anything objectionable to the Grey Knights-- In fact, it says specifically that their "innocent" blood is what helped. But, just for the sake of their own protection, they butcher them all down to the last and paint themselves in the blood.

It's a fairly unique instance of allied Imperial forces turning against one another where one is helpless to defend itself from the other, and made worse by both being among the holiest and most faithful of all Imperial factions.

It's not that unique for the GKs. Yes, they do kill loads of people to purge daemons, but at least there they can say "we had a reason, there was a daemon there... probably". The Bloodtide incident doesn't even have that. There's no precedent for Sister blood-- or anyone else's blood, for that matter, conferring protection, they never needed this kind of protection before besides, and then they go about obtaining this blood in the most violent and shameless manner possible against a weakened and helpless ally.

That, and the way they don't permit anyone to live after seeing them (at least without some mind-wiping.) Killing friendly units is practically their way of saying hello. But even then, they don't kill those that see them themselves. The Inquisition makes the judgement and then carries out the deed-- and even then, sometimes mind-wiping is an option rather than death.

So what are you trying to tell me, Grey Knights Codex? That the other Chapters are just chopped liver? That the Grey Knights alone bear the true burden of protecting the Imperium from destruction, without which nobody else would last half a minute? It's very nearly impossible to overemphasize the importance and grandeur the Grey Knights claim, at the direct expense of every other Imperial institution.

The core reason I don't like them is because they're overhyped Sues, but as Space Marines they're only the worst instance of an entire faction of overhyped Sues. In conclusion, I would say that if the setting must have Space Marines at all, and I figure it does, the usual batches serve well enough. A Super-Chapter of Super Space Marines is about as necessary as Godzilla becoming Super Godzilla; the original design was plenty for its role.

---

Some Selected Quotations.

" At the core of the Daemonhunters army is a collection of elite and incredibly skilled individuals who excel in every battlefield role. Even the lowest ranks of the Grey Knights are the equal of the strongest units of other armies. grey Knights exceptionally well equipped, meaning both their ranged and close combat capabilities far outstrip those of their brother Space Marines. "
- Daemonhunters Codex, 3rd Edition

This sums them up pretty well, I think.

" Such dedication is necessary if the grey Knights are to stand against the horrors of the Warp and, to date, such precautions have proven to be effective as not a single Grey Knight has faltered in battle or turned to Chaos. "
- Daemonhunters Codex, 3rd Edition

God, I hate that line.

" In aspect, a Purgation Squad appears little different to the Devastator Squads employed by more conventional Space Marine Chapters. In doctrine, however, the two are markedly different. In most Chapters, duty in a Devastator Squads is seen as an excellent opportunity for a new recruit to experience the sights and sounds of a battlefield. Not so in the Grey Knights. The weaponry wielded by a Purgation Squad is twice as deadly, a hundred times rarer and ten thousand times more valuable than the more commonplace armaments carried by Space Marine Devastators. "
- Grey Knights 5th Edition

That doesn't even begin to make sense, in a bad way.

" To pursue the endless war against the Daemons of Chaos takes more than a mere Space Marine. It takes a Grey Knight-- an altogether more difficile warrior, who is as far above other Space Marines as the Space Marines are above the common run of humanity. "
- Grey Knights Codex 5th Edition

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/difficile

40K Braindump #1

They are all people with guns. The difference is in the shape and size of those guns, and whom they tend to point them at.
As it is, 40K does not deserve its scale. It cannot feel as vast as it wants to, as there is too much homogeneity, too many precisely defined quantities that occupy too great a space. The map of the Calixis Sector may as well be a map of a single town for the lack of variegation within it; there is no way to convey the necessary vastness and detail.
The way to do this, I feel, is to consolidate, and more importantly, to open up. There must needs be variety, and support for that variety. There must be simple options and functional combinations, choices that matter in design and do not stifle within their framework.

The art, gamebook, etc. Space Marines beating one another up in close combat with big swords and guns.
Half the novels and every third AP, a sniper that spent three years setting up a trap using alien drugs and hyperthin wiring so he can stand on the third rafter of a consulate so he can assassinate an aristocrat with a needle rifle in exactly 3.46 seconds.
Dan Abnett's Blood Games illustrates this problem effectively. What is all this other stuff?
Bloody digital weapons. They irritate me inordinately.
Also lightning claws. They look silly.

A good GM should not say "no, you can't do that", but rather, "yes, you can do that, and here are the results and consequences of that."
I must mix things up, aerate the soil, take the calcified and refuse them in new ways, else there can be no living setting, and thus no fun to be had within it by a creating mind.

"Drive me closer; I want to hit them with my sword."
This line captures the tenor of a knowing, functioning 40K finely.
Chaos and Traitors are two different things.
Nobody talks about Tau Grey Knights. Those should exist, just as all combinations should exist, or at least have the possibility to.

It is all a personal refinement. I see a thing that I do not like, and thus I take it out. This is as it should be, and how I have always done it. If a made thing does not please me, I feel no qualm in breaking it and reassembling the pieces to better suit my personal needs. In this way could everyone have the made thing that best pleases them. Roleplaying games are a fine method for this personalized transmutation.
The test of this philosophy is its application. Here, I do it with 40K, but how many others could it serve? With it, I see great stuff, but also many flaws, and to get at the fruit I must shear away the rind.

Ads are go

It's taken a long time and a lot of figuring, but FTH finally has ads on it. I admit I've never done anything like this before, so I readily admit the current setup may be exceedingly off-putting for all I know. What I do know is that simply disabling your adblocker on this page will contribute to the blog and my continued writing. Thank you all, and now, back to work.

Sisters in Soulstorm: Our Lady of Run Away

I didn't much like Dawn of War: Soulstorm. This is not an unsual sentiment, of course; many people were disappointed by Soulstorm's lack of new content, the poor quality of what new content it did have and the various bugs resulting from it quite literally being missing the last 10% of its development (not the least of these troubles being the infamous load times on any non-cutting-edge computer).

Having to wait fully five minutes to get to the map screen aside, my chief complaint with Soulstorm was that the Sisters of Battle in particular were handled weakly. After years of Dawn of War's presence in the gaming atmosphere, this was the Sisters's big chance to shine in video game form. Alas, the result came through markedly less impressive than it could have. To be frank, I loved the voice acting for them virtually across the board-- the voice acting for characters is one of my favorite elements of Dawn of War and it enriches the game's atmosphere to no small degree-- but that's about all I can say in their favor in this iteration.

There are numerous mediocrities by my measure. The character models lack the polish and personality of the other factions, with bland expressions and spotty animations. The building design for the Sisters leaves much to be desired, a Sisters base looking more like St. Basil's Cathedral than the kind of dark, Gothic design one would expect.

The Sisters are known as the single most faithful faction in the entire Imperium, possibly more faithful per capita than any other group or race. And yet, in Dawn of War: Soulstorm, their morale breaks almost as easily as the Imperial Guard, who by the game's arithmetic are mostly cowards who need a Commissar to scare them into battle with a boltgun.

The Sisters can be upgraded to improve their morale, but this still seems off; if they weren't already unshakably, insanely faithful, they wouldn't be Sisters. I note that similarly, the Necrons can suffer from morale damage, even though their forces are comprised almost exclusively of soulless machines.

The game shows no qualms about giving different types of resources to different races-- Sisters get Faith; Orks get... Orks; Dark Eldar get Souls; Necrons actually lose a resource, making them more centralized-- and I see no reason Morale should not be apportioned the same way, as a unique resource that some factions simply do not have as a concern.

The Sisters represent an interesting quantity in Imperial society. They are the effective pinnacle of faith, the apex of fanatical devotion. They've got that old-time religion in their hearts, and they are going to use it to beat people to death.

Thinking about it, it further occurs to me that Sisters having an expendable Faith resource just cheapens things even more. The argument can be made that this is only fair, but by then "faith" no longer so much represents the strength of belief in the Sisters as it does the attention of the Emperor and whatever local energies come into play in making the miracles they summon. To make matters worse, they get more of it from adding artifacts to their listening posts; a guard tower explodes on the other side of the battlefield and suddenly the Sisters can't pray for healing anymore. You can see the problem.

In this case, it's a matter of morale rather than faith; the loss of a holy artifact (which they chose to install in a combat outpost, no less) can damage the morale of the warriors on the ground, but for it to actually quantifiably reduce their religious faith in the God-Emperor presents the Sister's faith as weak and inconstant-- entirely at odds with their characterization. The comical absurdism of it would be a boon if Dawn of War were trying to capture the dark comedy and tragic farce of classical Warhammer, but it isn't, and so it can only damage the tonal atmosphere and make the game sillier than it means to be.

For those interested in some very fine Battle Sisters models indeed, I would highly recommend looking up the French fan-made Witch Hunters mod for Dark Crusade 1.2. It's sadly incomplete and no longer in development, but what does exist is playable and most definitely worth seeing.

At the end of the day, the Adepta Sororitas as presented in Dawn of War: Soulstorm do have something to offer, if only their mere existence as a playable faction. The representation, however, leaves much to be desired. I mean that plainly; it leaves me wanting more and better than what I got, though I seriously doubt we're going to get a Battle Sister video game to compare with Space Marine or anything of the like any time soon.

J'retour

It has now been two months and seven days since last I made a post to this blog.

To be frank, the reasons for this dearth of posts are simply that I've been going through a lot of stress lately and have been preoccupied with other unrelated projects. In this time, I simply wasn't able to think of anything to write that would be interesting or useful enough to actually post here; however, in more recent times this has finally begun to turn around.

Mainly, I find myself interested in writing more about Warhammer 40,000 again, since I seem to be getting annoyed with it once more, which is how the blog got started to begin with. I've got some ideas for new articles; novel reviews, faction analysis, fan fiction and whatever other things I can come up with as I go along.

Watch this space in the coming days for new content, here at Forty Thousand Hammers.

Don't mind me

Just sprucing the place up a bit.

Made the background m'self in GIMP, which is a fine program. It is entirely possible everyone who sees it will hate it. I'm new enough to Blogger that wanton experimentation still feels valid.

Also added a shiny golden Paypal donation button, on the off chance someone feels I deserves a spot of dosh for my ramblings.

As ever, my continued gratitude to all of those people who keep making the view counter go up every day. It means a lot to me.

Early impressions of SIFRP, and [eventually] playing 40K with it

I found myself recently introduced to A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, which is, to be redundant, the roleplaying game based on the widely popular A Song of Ice and Fire novel series by George R. R. Martin (which I have not read... yet).

I had just started a PbP thread over on RPG.Net, with the notion of getting a Dark Heresy game together based around Blood of Martyrs. Someone generously offered to GM-- but only if we used SIFRP. It's a game system he's partial to for his own reasons, and one he's used a lot in the past. His attitude seems to be that it's a very good RPG on the whole, well-suited to running a variety of different games in addition to 40K, and good clean fit for PbP besides.

Naturally, I took an interest in this development, as while I'd heard positive mention of it numerous times across the forum, I knew nothing about it. Thus, I got the free quickstart from Green Ronin's site, and finding myself interested and impressed, shortly thereafter picked up the core. Others have done longer and better reviews of it, so I'll let you look up them.

My thinking here is to make a comparison between SIFRP and FFG40K, and see how they might model the same setting in their own ways. However, the question arises: are these elaborations anything more complex than any GM worth his salt could figure out on his own? Said differently, does 40K do anything unique enough that a system being able to model it meaningfully is unusual?

Warhammer 40,000 is a vast mashup of incongruous, and often contradictory status quos and states of mind. Combining the attitudes, directives and works of the plethora of official writers and artists and the majority of the active fanbase, 40K tries to be dark and grim, but fun and comical; serious and grandiose, yet self-aware and tongue in cheek. I think that-- all forms and functions considered-- SIFRP has a better mechanical and conceptual chance at capturing and expressing more of that experience than Fantasy Flight Games's stultifying Warhammer 40,000 roleplay line.

The issue with that comparison is that both systems are trying to emulate different models. SIFRP is built around providing a system that can run A Song of Ice and Fire, which while it has some parallels with 40K, is its own setting focused on medieval politics and intrigues with some fairly realistically-lethal combat for good measure. FFG40K is built around modeling the granular cruelty of life in the Imperium, with close details of exactly how it's killing you. The crunch in particular seems geared towards the wargamer's mindframe, which is only natural considering the source material (that said, FFG40K is considerably more complex than the actual 40K wargame, ruleswise).

If and when the game takes shape, I'll have a chance to feel SIFRP out for myself, and measure how my opinion changes in the process. These statements have been my impression; next comes experiment, and learning. For those curious about SIFRP, a free quickstart PDF is available on Green Ronin's site, the page in question right here.

A conversation on DARKWATCH

Playing BLOOD reminded me of a similar game from somewhat more recent memory-- Darkwatch, a dark shooter from the middle 00's. Despite the game's many flaws, I've always had a certain affection for it; what you see here is a direct refinement of a conversation a friend and I had on the game, exploring its conceptual merits and testing its logical fiber.

---

All right... to begin. Darkwatch was a dark supernatural horror western shooter for the Xbox (and probably the PS2), released sometime in 2003 I believe [it was actually 2005]. It focused on vampires, or what passed for them, hitting all the usual tropes while not paying much attention to the reasoning behind them.
Given the volume of behind-the-scenes material, extras and other production insights, it's clear the designers put a lot of time and effort into designing the game's setting, tone, aesthetic and story. You wouldn't really know this to look at it. This is a good chance to look at the creative process that goes into making such a game, and see if we can identify the flaws in it.
The game seemed highly derivative, compiling a lot of ideas without really giving them any meaning, and what makes it worse is that it was likely done because those elements were considered "classic", and thus good regardless of context.
Consider the main character's motivation: revenge. He seeks the villain for the purpose of getting even, sprinkled sparsely with some kind of nebulous moral issue that never sees fruition, or is elaborated on at all-- Jericho has no dialogue, even textually.
Let's also consider the Darkwatch itself. An organization that has supposedly existed since around the fall of the Roman empire, and has been protecting the world from supernatural evil (mostly vampires) ever since, using bog standard action weaponry dressed up in era-appropriate yet stylized aesthetics.
Of course, the game's manual can't help but add the vampires are the real reason Rome fell. Odd that nobody wrote that down. I find this especially annoying, and it's a pervasive attitude throughout the Darkwatch-- that they know "The Truth" about history and the supernatural, while the world remains ignorant, and that this is absolutely vital to their operations. It's supposed to be impressive and awing, but it simply makes them look like paranoid conspiracy theorists with far too many guns.
This is kind of like if police agencies the world over decided their job would be easier if nobody outside the police knew that crime existed. Considering the many different individuals, philosophies, ideologies, historical events, and political issues that have come into police work and crime over the *millennia*, it's certain that someone would spill the beans. That, in fact, some whole country might undergo a radical populist revolution and the new government might try a more open approach to this sort of thing. Or a huge and dangerous plot might blow up in the middle of some publically frequented area. The Secret Society aspect of the Darkwatch is probably worth quite a bit of dissection (not to mention denigration).

A collection of Darkwatch images: http://quizilla.teennick.com/stories/2953211/pictures-for-my-darkwatch-story-daughter-of-the-storm
Who exactly was going in for symbols like that in 66 AD? It doesn't really match my impressions of the contemporary styles. But then, the Darkwatch seems to be fairly timeless. I imagine they found some way to have rocket launchers and proximity mines even in the time immediately following Christ's ministry.
...say, there might be something there. Inspired by Jesus? *Started* by Jesus? Investigated Jesus?
The image page also adds:
>Their very unnoticeable too after all how many people really pay attention to a train going by?
1) lots of people, 2) especially if it looks like THAT.
Actually, that one's not even as crazy-looking as the one I remember in the game. It had that badge logo emblazoned on it the size of a storefront. Tip: if you want a train that won't be noticed, normal-looking trains are both commercially available and quite easy to build. You don't have to emblazon your logo on it if you don't want people to know who runs the train. Really.
Speaking of the train, apparently they keep captured vampires stored in a vault, exactly like the kind used to store gold at the time. Said vault also has the logo on it-- or rather, *is* the logo.
The game tries to combine the wild west with vampires and related supernatural horror monsters like zombies and... well, zombies. Not necessarily a bad idea. See also Deadlands RPG, and Tomahawk comics. Indeed, it isn't really a bad concept on its own, although I do tend to be wary of "X meets Y" setting concepts.
The problem lies in execution. As an FPS, I suppose it's probably expecting too much for there to be a detailed plot or story or, most importantly, characterization of any kind. However, Darkwatch seems to have the framework for these things, while failing to provide them. They'd might have actually made for a better game experience if we could be made to care about the characters involved.
They have a story, or the rudiments of one. They have named characters with sharp visual designs and decent voice actors, but what little story we get feels *rushed*-- and this is a problem in all of the game's cutscenes, both in terms of narrative and pace of editing. It feels like the game is in a big hurry to tell you about all these ideas it has, rattling off one thing after another in a sequence of not-necessarily-related snips.

Here's the trailer, which depicts Jericho wielding weapons with rapid automatic fire, which is a lie as bare as a monkey's ass: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&NR=1&v=qNsBVvVsY3o
And while I'm at it, the prologue video, featuring that train: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbnSI3fUDno&feature=endscreen&NR=1
The point about the automatic fire is one I feel the need to emphasize; there are no proper automatic weapons in the game. Every gun requires you to manually pull the trigger to get a shot off. The one exception is the Warmaker dual pistols, which have this terrible recoil effect that means your view is kicked upwards. You have to compensate by pushing your view down or risk shooting off into the sky.
It's a change from virtually every other FPS I've played, and it's especially noticable on the Xbox controller, which has these big heavy spring-loaded triggers for the L and R keys. Especially when fighting many enemies, you would often find yourself desperately yanking R trying to fire fast enough to save yourself. Even Blood doesn't have this problem; simply hold the button down to saturate the area with fire.

The plot begins with Jericho Cross in a tan duster and broad-brimmed hat trying to rob a train-- this is something he makes a living at, apparently. The difference is that this last train (and for some reason the game emphasizes that he intends this to be the last train he ever robs for unstated but presumably unrelated reasons) does not contain gold, but a vampire.
Just as Jericho reaches the vault to set his bomb, Cassidy, a Darkwatch agent, shows up to explain to him that he's doing something stupid. Of course the fuse has already been lit, and a moment later the vault is blown. Lazarus Malkoth, with his hunched stature, huge inverted cross tattoo and tight leather pants escapes the vault and bites Jericho. This doesn't turn him into a vampire entirely, but begins the vampirification "process", which admittedly looks a whole lot like being a full-blown vampire.
So does Cassidy kill him? No, she just sort of goes "welp, there goes that. Better join the Darkwatch now, since we know about this kind of thing and can probably help you recover, even though we've hated your kind passionately since before the birth of western civilization." She's got more than enough reasons to kill him: 1) he just tried to rob her train, releasing a dangerous vampire in the process, 2) he's seen the secrets they're dedicated to keeping secret, and 3) he is becoming a vampire. For that matter, if he robs a lot of trains, he was probably already a wanted outlaw.
And yet, she does no him no harm. In fact, she spends the rest of her short life defending him in battle and helping him to get from the wreckage of train-- pursued by a winged Lazarus and tons of undead ryders (note the "Y")-- to the very heart of her vampire-hunting organization in the mountains. She quite literally dies for him-- and then comes back as a ghost to continue helping him through spotting and running commentary.
I think the idea is that he's not *really* a vampire yet-- only part. Even though barely a few hours after escaping the train he's burning in the presence of crosses and unable to ingest anything but blood without retching. But even without the vampire issue, she's got no reason to let him live.
Neither does any other living or non-living being he encounters. And yet, everyone allows him to live. Even Lazarus himself, right after killing Cassidy, has the weak and frightened Jericho at his mercy, but chooses not to kill him, and then to put him through the trouble of fighting through a haunted mine to "prove" himself or something.

One thing I think is worth mentioning here is one of the game's ongoing mechanics; the moral choices. These have no bearing on the plot, but determine the powers you get.
At this point, Cassidy's beheaded body is lying at the bottom of the mineshaft with you. You can choose to respectfully leave it be and continue to resist becoming a vampire (Good) or feed on it and embrace your monstrous nature (Evil). This is a very common theme in vampire fiction, and it surfaces here in the familiar form.

Anyway, before that happens, Cassidy finally delivers Jericho to the Darkwatch outpost, which features a gigantic levitating rock in which are a number of important facilities. How the rock is levitating is not explained, but it doesn't need to be since it exists only to suggest that these people are anachronistically advanced technologically in the most concise way possible-- again, hurrying things along at speed. They certainly do like to advertise their powers, too. As well as choosing a base location which is hard for normal humans to get to, but provides no protection against enemies who can fly.
The first that happens is Jericho is shot in the head with a high-powered sniper rifle. He does not die. In fact, this was probably done for no reason other than to say "THIS is how tough vampires are in this setting".
It would seem that the Darkwatch was able to detect his vampirism by his big stonking glowing red eye (singular; for some reason the empty socket where he used to wear an eyepatch lights up red). So our sniper could see that he was in custody, and could also see that he was a vampire, and yet shot him, with a weapon that doesn't work on vampires. It punctuates the end of the cutscene.
Jericho is then taken into custody, where he's locked in a maze that comprises the citadel's sewer system and apparently something to do with their power plant. They also keep scads of captured vampiric zombies in there.
This is where Clay Cartwright shows up. The apparent leader of the Darkwatch, with Colonel Sanders facial hair and a southern accent. Not to mention a rather intimidating walking stick.
He's the leader of the local chapter, anyway; the impression I got was that this particular citadel is only one base; they have others elsewhere in the world, and probably some huge main one somewhere. Maybe Rome, since they seem to like to mention it.
Anyhow, this is where Clay gripes about how much he hates vampires and rattles off all the charges against Jericho-- Clay is the only person that actually has Jericho's criminal record handy, it would seem-- and then... sends him through the "training maze" to see what he's made of. The idea seems to be to test how much humanity he has left. If he has enough, they'll let him join the Darkwatch and lend him their support in going after Lazarus.

How does getting through a maze prove that he isn't a dirty lousy no-good train robber/vampire? It's full of vampire zombies, and also some civilians they kidnapped and locked underground. They count how many of them he killed, if any.
Wait, the organization *protecting* the world from vampires and zombies kidnapped civilians and put them in a maze full of vampire zombies and one potential psycho? What if he'd been a real vampire and turned them all into vampires?
Then they would need to kidnap more people to replace them all. Obviously. And then they'd have that many more vampires on their hands, and given their demonstrated procedure so far they'd have to get more civilians to test each one in the maze...
This is where we can no longer really deny Jericho's Gary Stuism. There is no logical reason for anything to work in his favor, and yet everything does. It's clear that the Darkwatch would never waste their time testing any other half-vampire for purity; they did it special just for Jericho. Also, for some reason it appears that most of the civilians they've captured have gone insane. Alternatively, they were acquired from insane asylums. Or the vampire zombies had something to do with it.
Come to think of it, what's going to happen to these civilians? I mean, they've seen the secret base and the vampire zombies and stuff, right? Isn't that supposed to be secret? Yes, it is. Which is why none of them will ever be released. (In fact, I'm not sure how any of them are alive at all. One almost gets the impression the entire gauntlet of townies and monsters was set up expressly for Jericho to run.)
So what is Jericho being tested for here? What is the behavior expected of a Darkwatch operative in this situation? The measure the game seems to use is how many people he kills or otherwise abuses. I apparently passed one particular part of the test with flying colors the very first time I played the game because it never even occurred to me to kill any of them; I just ignored them entirely, and suddenly Clay is cussin' in surprise.
But... in this situation, standard Darkwatch procedure *would* be to do what Clay is doing, i.e. kill or permanently imprison them. I mean, *he* didn't leave them alone. They're never going to leave the citadel again in their lifetimes, and they're being indefinitely detained for the purposes of vampire testing, agent target practice and scientific experimentation (of course they have a whole bunch of scientists who seem to have mastered mass levitation without knowing much of anything about human beings).
So is Jericho being held to a higher/different moral standard than Darkwatch itself? Yes. Granted, something of a point is made of that, but not much of one. It essentially boils down to Cassidy saying "hey, you guys didn't used to be like this," and then the matter dropping like lead.
Maybe the "civilians" are actually Darkwatch operatives pretending to be civilians for the purposes of the training exercise? That would make some sense, except that Darkwatch operatives are known to enjoy running wild through towns murdering people for fun. There is an entire level predicated on this. It is a stupid as it sounds.

Jericho ultimately completes the maze, and is immediately inducted into the Darkwatch. They give him a custom-fit black leather outfit (complete with pre-shredded coattails) and relatively privileged access to their armory. Their security on him seems inversely proportional to their distrust.
This is also where Tala comes out, the Indian slut with the huge breasts. I wish those words didn't have to go together, but that is precisely what the game presents us with at this point.

Actually, that raises a question. Before Europeans landed in the New World, what was the situation there vis-a-vis vampires etc.? Several possibilities occur:
1) It was in fact overrun with them, and historians either failed to notice this fact or chalked it up to strange native customs.
2) There weren't any because vampires hadn't come to the New World yet either.
3) There was a native equivalent of the Darkwatch taking care of things.
4) The Darkwatch already set up there in secret long before other Europeans did, and took care of al the vampires and zombies without anyone knowing.
5) Nobody was doing anything about it, but it still wasn't a problem, and the Darkwatch is useless.

It's interesting, because there really don't seem to *be* very many vampires around. In fact, Lazarus may well be the only one in the entire territory of Arizona. Somehow I doubt this is due to the effectiveness of the Darkwatch. So it does beg the question. Are they needed, or can society get along just fine without them?
It's hard to say. They certainly give the impression of being vital, and given the sheer number of monsters that spawn throughout the game it does seem likely that some large paramilitary force armed with anti-supernatural knowledge and training would be necessary to keep them in check. As for keeping them secret... I honestly don't think it's even remotely possible. Lazarus casts out a wave of undead summoning the moment he escapes; the thing spreads across the desert for probably hundreds of miles, reanimating every dead body into a zombie. He probably performed similar (and larger) summonings later on in other places, and *he* certainly doesn't care whether people notice.

Now, to look at things from an objective creative standpoint, the reason there are Native Americans in the setting *at all* is because it is a western, and you can't do a western without injuns. The creators obviously didn't think of them in anthropological terms, and especially didn't think about what their presence means and implies. I think most of their effort went into making loads of concept art, the better to give the impression that their setting was a big thing.
I would call the point moot, as we have no proof that Tala is, in fact, Native, besides the statement in the manual and the feather in her hair-- but then we later have levels where you fight Native zombies in burning Native villages and burial grounds, so obviously they do exist in sizable numbers. And indeed, a New World that was devoid of human presence before European arrival would probably make for a rather drastic alternate history. The whole point of using the wild west motif at all was to work from established history and tropes.

As for Tala, that is the sum of her character; Native American whore with large breasts. She doesn't really grow beyond that. I can't find it offhand, but the cinematic where she appears has her literally standing in a doorway (revealed by a quick shift of the camera) where she introduces herself by name and makes a suggestive remark. It takes all of seven seconds. There isn't anything more of consequence about her until after the sex scene, which is after all the citadel missions.

The three citadel missions you can choose from involve fighting through the aforementioned burning Native village (which for some reason involves lots of large, complex adobe buildings).

Which reminds me that there are no Mexicans or indeed Hispanics of any stripe in the game. Apparently they felt it would be racist. Probably what they mean is that it would be racist to include the Mexican characters *they* had in mind.
Oh, wait, there is one; the bandito zombie with the hangman's hood. They don't talk at all, so we're spared their undead impersonations, but they do have a really ridiculous run.
My memory may be fuzzy, but I think they occasionally pretend to play mariachi-style guitar on their shotguns. I may or may not be misremembering.

There's the Coyote Steamwagon level, which passes through... another adobe village. The Steamwagon is a one-man wheeled contraption that has a great swinging minigun mounted on it which has infinite ammunition. The wagon itself appears to be indestructible, although Jericho can still die while riding it. Especially since his seat is right on the front of it with no rails or supports and barely even a seat. He would need to be crucified onto it to be more exposed.
The Darkwatch made it. The result of decades of cutting-edge scientific research. It's apparently experimental and the team transporting it back to the lab after testing was killed, hence the need for Jericho to go-- alone-- to retrieve it and kill the remaining enemies with it.
Picture: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_sA1YX1TmnEc/SdO5McFZOuI/AAAAAAAAAjc/HYUgMa7KtzE/s400/CoyoteSteamWagon_concept.jpg
It looks like the bottom half of a car. I bet it would be shaking quite a bit, especially if you were driving it over rough terrain. There is a seat, but it's apparently the sort from a bicycle.
It's too bad whoever made it had never heard of coaches, trains, boats, or any other sort of vehicle that provides a modicum of shelter and something to brace oneself against. Even Leonardo da Vinci's prototype tank sketches from I think the 1600s included armor plating that goes all the way up and over.
I distinctly recall dying on the steamwagon level many times because of all the mounted machine guns the zombies had. I had to drive the stupid thing all the way behind the buildings and very carefully poke out to fire.
You could also just hop out of the thing and try fighting on foot, but the level gave you so many enemies you had no chance at all unless you rode the wagon and used the gigantic machine gun.
Still, must give them some kind of points for having zombies that actually shoot back. Often with superior firepower.

One of the other levels was a fairly nondescript combat crawl through a town, with some lingering around a saloon (since the old west had those and all). That one I remember because the agent shouting "Reapers!" to announce the coming of that particular type of enemy sounded like "Rapers!" due to his absurd accent. I always wondered why the zombie's lower bodies were always more intact than the upper.
The last level in that batch was to do with a MacGuffin called the Deadlight Prism, which is a solid black sphere with green rays coming off it and apparently enables vampires to survive in sunlight. Where did this come from? Nowhere. It just exists.
There may be some feeble attempt at justifying its existence, but as far as the game itself goes, it is a thing and it does a thing and therefore we must stop the enemy from getting it, which guarantees that he will.
This sounds like something it would be really good to destroy. Sure, the Darkwatch has one vampire working for them now, but the vampires have, well, all the other vampires, and the odds are that the bad vampires would find it more useful.
And you know, it occurs to me that this is the second Darkwatch caravan to be attacked and lose important cargo, only for it to sit around untouched until agents are dispatched to collect it again. The third, actually, if you count the original train Jericho tried to rob. Just where are they sending all these vital high-risk things that they keeping getting lost out in the middle of the desert? These guys are pretty accident-prone. You'd think they were deliberately trying to cause as many undead incidents as possible for no other reason than to create relevance for themselves.
For that matter, why would something like the Prism need to be transported at all? If the Darkwatch had it in the first place, and for some reason decided not to destroy it, wouldn't they already have it stored in the most secure place they've got? Unless they were sending it as a present for Jericho.
If they were, he didn't get to keep it. It went straight into their maximum-security museum as soon as they got it back. It's possible that it had just been discovered and was being transported to base the first time, but it still doesn't bode well for them.

Anyhow, once those missions are done with, you get the Hangtown mission, where Darkwatch regulators run around laughing slowedly while sniping innocent bystanders and I guess drinking or something? They're all acting pretty stupid. Tala is around there somewhere scouting ahead. Remarks are made on her posterior in one of these missions. How would this organization stay secret for so much as a week? There is little to distinguish Darkwatch agents from slovenly drunken thugs.
By the end of Hangtown, you've killed a slew of monsters, but also pretty much an entire town of normal humans besides. Tala votes to lie about the damage, which Jericho does not do. Clay Cartwright is *exceedingly* peeved at their behavior, which is a rare point in his favor. I guess this is what happens when you start recruiting whatever random bandits show up on your train. They have no one to blame but themselves.

This is where the sex scene comes in, titled "Prom Night" in the menu screen. (They misspelled "pr0n.") After being yelled at profusely by Clay, Jericho storms off and Tala goes to sweet-talk him for a bit. They then go and hump on the roof of what looks like St. Paul's Basilica if it had existed in Gotham City. Tala is, of course, butt-naked, while Jericho remains fully dressed.
(random note: an *entire page* of absurd outfits for Tala : http://pandakimmi.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/darkwatch.jpg )
During the fairly tame proceedings, Tala tempts Jericho with her blood (cutting a swathe around her neck with a fingernail in what I guess is supposed to be a sexy gesture). He drinks her blood, and then I guess falls asleep on the roof after? He wakes up in a bed inside later on, so I'm not sure what happens there.
Jericho is awakened by alarm bells as Tala, now a vampire herself, proceeds to destroy the Darkwatch base from the inside out.
Yup. She deliberately seduced Jericho for the express purpose of getting bitten and turning into a vampire. She may very well have joined the Darkwatch for the purpose of finding a vampire to get bitten by.
She was counting on them not expecting it, and it worked. I guess it also helps that for some reason her eyes never went glowy, despite being an even more powerful vampire than Jericho ever was. I seem to recall some vague mention of her being some kind of shaman and having Indian Powers of some kind, which may contribute to this.
One way or another, she kicks a bunch of agents in the throat, takes some guns, puts on an even more absurd outfit consisting of olive low-riders and some lace and takes the Ghost Door out to somewhere. Did I mention the Darkwatch have teleporters?
What do they need the blindingly conspicuous and vulnerable trains for, then? Well, you can't put the logo on the warp portal. Nobody will see it.
Why not just teleport the Prism (and Lazarus, for that matter) to whatever its destination was? Because if there was no train, there was nothing for Jericho to rob. And it's very important that Jericho's personal needs be provided for

Then the self-destruct sequence starts. And Jericho has to fight his way down into the mechanical bowels of the citadel and shut down the reactors.
The Darkwatch base apparently runs on several atomic reactors. At least two of them, or something. When you get down there, there are these two huge machines with lots of electrodes and stuff that you have to throw the switches on to shut down.
Wait, atomic reactors? For that you'd need uranium, and at this point nobody in the mundane world even knows what that is, and you need to go mining for it, and people will *notice* someone digging a whole new mine, and then figuring out enough of the physics to get power out of it is a whole other boondoggle, and assembling all the parts and tech would take a large industrial base and a whole lot of people with wide-ranging skills, people who have spent their lives studying this very topic, and you can't just...
Levitating. Rock.
I liked how this was handled in Galaxy Quest, where the main characters have to shut down the aliens' neutron reactor before it overloads, and they point out that (being from present-day Earth) they don't *know* how to shut down a neutron reactor. It turns out to be a rather complex procedure.
Of course, in Jericho's case, shutting down the citadel reactors is pretty easy, since, again, big on/off switch. Right on the front.
But then again, nobody said it was a *fission* reactor. Maybe there's two kidnapped civilians chasing one another in circles around a magnetic coil inside each one. Or they might just be burning coal or something. There is no evidence of coal anywhere in the base, but then they use so much black in the decor and uniforms maybe I just couldn't see it.
There's no failsafes or anything, just these big ON/OFF levers. At some point Cartwright set them to overload, hoping the explosion would vaporize Tala and the rest of the monsters invading his base. At some point during all this chaos, Lazarus attacks.

Lazarus' attack is announced by him breaking into the museum through the skylight and grabbing the Deadlight Prism which is inside a glass case right in the middle of the room.
http://www.absolute-video-games.com/video/127/lazarus-triumphant Take note of the game's tendency towards snappy, whiplashesque editing in CG cutscenes.
Well, Lazarus gets the prism and hulks out. He then begins hurling these ugly brown fireballs all over the place and everything up in flames. Jericho tries to fight him and after emptying maybe four hundred clips into him he finally kills him. This marks the big moral turning point of the game, where standing over Lazarus' body gives you the chance to either give up being a vampire, or claim the "Curse of the West" for yourself and take his place.
So vampires can be killed by shooting them enough times? Sort of. They mention at one point that only Jericho can kill Lazarus because Lazarus sired him and he's not full vampire yet and also because plot.
At any rate, Jericho does, in fact, kill Lazarus. The rest of the game plays out more or less exactly the same except for the plot, based on whether you chose good or evil. You may have seen this coming, but Cassidy represents good and Tala evil. Whichever side you pick, the other one becomes the final boss. The boss fight is identical either way, and they both use the exact same list of powers as Lazarus, with maybe one more that's slightly more powerful.
This doesn't happen immediately after the Lazarus fight; you do have to complete a level or two in between. Deadwood is the name of the last town level, which is full of towering black spikes erupting from the earth and lots of lava and leaning buildings.
If you chose good, you meet Cassidy's ghost before it goes up to heaven (or the moon; she disappears into the full moon) and get your vampirism cured, shown by Jericho's eye-light going out.
If you chose evil, you have one last violent snog with Tala before killing her, drinking most of her blood and getting two glowy eyes as you become full vampire. Also a bit where Jericho throws his Darkwatch badge away.

I feel like some comparisons could be made to BLOOD, and many of them would be unfavorable. Both of them are quite similar aesthetically and plotwise, sometimes suspiciously so; I would almost call Darkwatch the spiritual successor to BLOOD, except that it doesn't quite deserve the relation.

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BONUS: Similarities between BLOOD's Caleb and Darkwatch's Jericho
- Black hats and coats
- Glowing red eyes
- Wild West Outlaw
- Supernatural powers
- Drinks blood
- Serves Secret Organization
- Fights Zombies
- Wields Dynamite Recklessly

In speech, they differ, as Caleb has a fair amount of speech in the game while Jericho is mute. That's about it.

I have been playing BLOOD

And I have been enjoying it.

BLOOD is a well-aged FPS from the DOS days, expertly crafted, thoroughly playable and full of atmosphere. I've only discovered it quite recently, and I find myself struck by it; I've played shooters, and I've played horror games, but never a combination quite like this. It is unique, effective and satisfying.

The game uses the Build engine, the same as Duke Nukem 3D, Lo Wang and any number of other clones made in the late 90s. This means the gameplay is smooth, active and eminently functional.

The setting is a mixture of the old west and the roaring twenties, with a heavy dollop of Satanic influence. Mercifully the game avoids the use pentagrams, inverted or non, preferring actual crosses, inverted or non, and other more obscure occult symbols. The plot is sparse at best, but what little there is informs to the main character's actions with simplicity. Caleb and his fellow cultists, including the woman he loves, have been disavowed by their dark god Tchernabog, many of them killed in the process. Caleb among them. By some means, Caleb comes back from the dead, searching for the corpses of his former companions to drain them of their power so that he can stand against Tchernabog on equal terms. While Caleb's intentions are generically vengeful and violent, the story is as much about finding out why Caleb and the rest of the cult were punished as seeking revenge, which to me seems unusual, and somewhat refreshing.

The weapons are earthy and evocative, well-suggestive of the periods it draws inspiration from. Your melee weapon is a pitchfork, which combines well with Caleb's aesthetic and alludes to his demonic nature. Instead of a pistol, you get a flare gun that sets enemies on fire. Following that is the trusty sawed-off shotgun, then a slick tommy gun, and bundles of TNT for grenades-- for which Caleb even has a lighter for igniting the fuse, which shows more attention to detail than most games would afford.
Some of the other weapons are more offbeat, like the napalm cannon that has red running lights (which make me think of range top burners) and fires balls of burning gasoline-- essentially a rocket launcher. The spray can combines Caleb's lighter with an aerosol can to make a flamethrower (and I'm still trying to understand the reasoning behind that one. My feeling is that it's an element of realism, a dangerous but powerful thing that a person could really do with easily obtainable materials; there's something more immediately forbidden about it than even the firearms or magic weapons.) The oddest one is the fairly nondescript Tesla Cannon, a kind of grey tube that rapidly fires a stream of extremely powerful blue electric blasts-- causing your victims' skeletons to glow through their bodies on impact. Compared to the others, it's conceptually sound but visually bland; adding some humming electrodes or at the very least some cabling would have gone a long way to making it look like the electric execution machine it purports to be.
Last are the two magical weapons. One is the Life Leech, a skull staff that spits explosive fireballs while rays of light spray from the eye sockets. Just watching it in action is fun. Finally, we have the voodoo doll. It does exactly what you might expect; face an enemy, then "fire" to jab it with pins until the enemy dies. The alt-fire completely expends the doll's ammo, but kills the target instantly, and Caleb's wizardly hand-wave as he activates this power just makes it that much more boss.

I really like what the game does with the alt-fire modes. It creates a lot of variety in combat, giving you choices about how to use your weapons beyond simply pointing and shooting. The shotgun can fire either one shell at a time, or let loose with both barrels. The tommy gun can shoot straight or go into a deadly lateral spray. Dynamite can be thrown or dropped, set to explode on impact or with a timer (the fuse visibly burning down to let you know how much time is left). The napalm cannon can fire a single blast or unleash a raging ammo-guzzling inferno that can set an entire room ablaze-- you included. While simple, these options add tangible flavor to combat.

The most common enemies are zombies and cultists. The zombies are stubborn and tend to get back up two or three times after being shot down, but are limited to axes for weapons. Cultists have shotguns and tommy guns, but are otherwise easy to kill. Other enemies include gargoyles, which are frightening in their speed of movement, howling and roaring loudly. They fly around overhead, swooping and circling at a dizzying rate, and their close-up attack is painful besides. They are genuinely scary in a way that very few game enemies have been in my experience.
One of the best things about the cultists is also one of the best things about the game-- sound design. The sound effects and voice clips are excellent; cultists shout phrases in their fictitious pseudo-Latin cult language, zombies howl when killed, all of the weapons have powerful, punchy effects, every kind of surface makes a unique noise when shot, doors creak and slam, machines whirr and hum, fire crackles and roars. The CD music, of which there is a decent amount, sets a richly creepy atmosphere with an undercurrent of ambient sound, using plenty of choral elements and rattly percussion. One piece even features a distorted recording of a group of children laughing and playing, as if things weren't eerie enough.
I should talk a bit more about the cultists. They speak a great deal in the game; according to what I've read, their strange language is a hodgepodge of Latin and Sanskrit, made up by one of the game designers just for the sound of it. The cultists have quite a few voice clips, and have a number of animations and actions besides simply shooting like ducking and throwing dynamite; one gets a sense that these are characters, not merely sprites you shoot at, and this too contributes to the atmosphere.

The thing that I keep coming back to is atmosphere. The tenor and aesthetic really sell the darkness without becoming bitter; while it's serious about the horror elements, it knows better than to take itself seriously. There are decomposing and disemboweled corpses hung on chains in meat lockers, cultists massacring civilians even as you come upon them, brains suspended in bloody jars, altars to evil powers accompanied by deep-throated chanting-- but there are also moments of levity and even jocularity, largely in the form of Caleb's quotes and references, to keep things from becoming truly miserable. It achieves, I think, a healthy balance between splatterpunk and humor, accomplishing darkness while avoiding grimdarkness.

There are some flaws, of course. My primary complaint-- and it's not much of one-- is that it lacks a sense of climax. Even after completing all of the campaigns, I never really felt as if the situation presented was truly resolved. It doesn't help that the ending is extremely short and not a little vague. Also not helping is that the cutscenes are all FMVs, and the limitations of 1990s 3D graphical technology show bitterly.

All told, this game is a rich, evocative and finely-made shooter that would do good service to any collection. I consider it to be the best such game I own. The One Unit Whole Blood package containing Blood and all its expansions is available on GOG.com for only $5.99, which given the quality is an incredible value. I recommend it highly.

A Pragmatic Repurposing

After a period of deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that I am unable to maintain this blog with any reasonable alacrity so long as the topic remains limited to Warhammer 40,000-- I simply don't have enough to say about it. As such, I'm officially broadening the scope of this blog to include other subjects, including but not limited to roleplaying games, writing and my own original projects.

My thanks to the nearly 600 people who have passed through so far, however briefly.

Ixion Reads NIGHTBRINGER [Spoilers]

So I finally managed to get my hands on the Ultramarines Omnibus, containing the first three Warhammer 40,000 novels by Graham McNeill and published by Black Library. As I continue my explorations of the setting, I've turned to the narrative fiction to get a view of long-term characterization and plot. Here's my impressions of the first book in the series, Nightbringer.

I readily admit this post is jumbled, disoriented and might even have some gaping holes in it. In my defense, the book was kind of like that, too.

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The Omnibus opens with a short story, Chains of Command, where Uriel and his captain, Idaeus, are introduced. There's a big battle scene where some stuff is established, thousands of guardsmen die and some Chaos Marines show up, followed by a bridge exploding; at the end of it, Idaeus is dead and Uriel's captain. Woohoo.

Our story proper opens with Gedrik, a simple herdsman on his way home after a long day of herding grox. After introducing him, his companions and their peaceful snow village, said village comes under attack by Dark Eldar and is destroyed-- on the very same page. This scene serves to set the tone-- grimdark with a side of manipulative empathy-tugging-- and introduce the Dark Eldar as the de facto adversary of the story, for all the good it does.

Now we're taken to Macragge, where we meet our protagonist, Uriel Ventris, recently made captain of the Ultramarines Fourth Company following the death of their former captain, Idaeus. According to Ultramarines chapter master Marneus Calgar, the planet Pavonis is having trouble with Eldar pirates, as well as having management problems such as not turning in the required Imperial tithe, so an adept is being sent there to check things out and the place back on track. Uriel has to transport this person safely.

Out on Pavonis, things are a mess; people are in the streets protesting some new tax the governer is imposing to help pay the lax tithe, and the Arbites are attempting to stave them off until the governor can escape. We meet their leader, Judge Virgil Ortega, trying to fend off the crowd, assisted by his compratriots Jenna Sharben (an upright and dutiful career woman without much else to define her) and someone named Collix (a loose cannon, figuratively and literally, who has no qualms about shooting people who don't behave). They don't really do anything character-wise, so just pretend that whenever I mention the Arbites it's these guys in some capacity.

Now we actually get to the Dark Eldar. Admiral Tiberius and the UMs are making their way to Pavonis. Barzano shows up and annoys everyone on the bridge by being nosy and chatty, then suddenly gets really serious and starts issuing orders as the Dark Eldar swoop in and attack. There's some shooty tactical stuff, but nothing you haven't seen on Star Trek nine hundred times, albeit on a slower time scale.

When the battle is complete, Uriel and Barzano make their way down to the planet for a meet-and-greet with the local authorities-- in this case, the family leaders of the various manufacturing cartels. A bunch of cartel leaders and some of their lackeys are introduced, but they're all samey, sleazy big business types painted over with foppish regal glamor; you could replace the lot of them with the cast of The Libertine almost to a man. The popularity of pelisses certainly doesn't hurt. There's Vendare Taloun the generic aristocratic scumbag, Solana Vergren the bossy boisterous woman, Taryn Honan the fat fop who likes boys and has no business sense, Beauchamp Abrogas the lazy stoner and maybe another one that slipped beneath my attention entirely. Oh, right, Kasimir de Valtos, the veteran type who got skinned and tortured by the Dark Eldar, has frequent surgery and lots of vivid flashbacks. His villainhood is without question almost immediately, so I feel no qualms in just stating that right now.

There's a meeting where all the leaders get together to decry the governor and everyone is described in more detail, but few of them actually matter and the whole thing is actually pretty boring. We're only a few chapters in, and already the story is bogged down with far too many characters with too little interest to spread between them for any of them to be worth keeping track of. You can entirely forget fully nine-tenths of the people in that meeting and still have the same working knowledge of the story thus far ten chapters from now.

Now we come to chapter five, and what I think is quite possibly one of the most powerful scenes in the novel, taking up all of a single page: the surgery of the kyerzak. This scene, short as it is, illustrates the core themes of the Dark Eldar clearly and concisely: torture and sex, often at the same time. We're shown in graphic detail all the surgical torments inflicted on the human subject, paralyzed but capable of full sensation, by the mysterious Surgeon; his body is dismantled as one by one, all of his guts are removed, put on life support and paraded in front of him, all while the curvaceous vampiric wych does nude gymnastics over his helpless body, inflicting erotic bites and nips upon it. At the end of it, the human comes out of the room in a bathrobe, cleansed and reassembled good as new, with the wych on his arm like Hugh Hefner after a night on the town.

The entire torturous, hours-long operation was a sex thing.

...okay, so it's explained a bit later on that it's more about cleansing his organs and stuff than kink, even if there is that, but "sadomasochism cranked up to 11" sounds cooler than "dialysis cranked up to 11" to me, so that's what I'm taking away from it.

Now we have one of a number of scenes involving the mines and how creeped out the miners are, plus how the generators are operational, but no power's coming out of them. What I think we're supposed to take away from this is that the generators keep not working because the Nightbringer is draining them of energy, but

All the way over in chapter 13, we have Taryn Honan just sort of wandering into de Valtos' mansion, taking a moment to sniff Solana Vargren's pelisse like a dog. Look, I get it already: Honan is supposed to be a perv. That was the sum of his existence when we first saw him, and nothing's happened to change that in the intervening period.
De Valtos comes downstairs with a terrified Vendare Taloun; Kasimir's apparently in a really gnarly mood and decided to just go ahead and show Vendare all his bloody surgical tools and let him know about he dices people like green onions to keep his blood clean or whatever. Taryn is whining about how the inquisitor was mean to him and asked uncomfortable questions, so Kasimir tells him he's useless and stupid, which makes him cry. Mercifully we don't have to endure it for long, as the Surgeon shows up and stabs him in the throat with a needle full of Space Morphine.

One gets the impression Kasimir simply got fed up with the fake pleasantries he kept forcing himself to make to everyone else and goes about letting them know he's actually evil-- that is, more so. Everything is going to hell; the city's a warzone, his enemies in the cartel leadership are dead or worse and his plan is almost complete. What difference does it make?

Barzano, the governor and her advisors are holed up inside the governer's palace while the city outside tears itself apart. Somewhere in the building, some kind of demonic monsters materialize out of nowhere and start hunting for the governor. Some Ultramarines get killed, the fight drags right into the room the governor's hiding in, but finally the day is saved when Barzano comes at them with his secret power sword. Which, along with the rosette, reveals that he is, in fact, an Inquisitor.
Somehow this just doesn't change the dynamic of the character much at all for me.

Now that Barzano's been outed as an Inquisitor, he takes a moment to conduct some exposition explaining just how bad everything really is. He brings out a big book and uses some psyker power to open it, which makes the humans apprehensive and the Space Marines offended and on guard. These reactions are supposed to denote the seriousness of the presence of Sorcery! among faithful Imperials, but in practice, it makes the Ultramarines look naive, which only reinforces their "goody two-shoes" stereotype. Surely a Space Marine, of all people, would know that the Inquisition sometimes makes use of "radical" methods, not the least of which is the widespread use of psykers? This is not a thing that should have come as a surprise to anyone in the room beyond it coming from someone who was supposed to be a simple adept.
Following this revelation, clues come up revolving around the word kyerzak, and with a bit of finesse the old adept with Barzano explains just what it means in the Dark Eldar tongue, based on some research someone did on them a while back.
Now, this is an interesting point; just how many long-term firsthand anthropological studies have been done on the Dark Eldar? How long would it take the Sisters Dialogus to sift through thousands of hours of recorded audio of Dark Eldar language to decode and translate its meanings enough to so much as get a working definition of a single word? I imagine quite a long time, especially counting all the breaks they'd have to take for prayers, showers and vomiting.

Assaulting Kasimir's estate on the off chance he's home and based on the tenuous assumption that he is guilty of various ill-defined crimes, the Ultramarines discover all manner of horrors, including medical instruments, Solana's flayed corpse and a couple of powered-down Necrons hooked up to some batteries (the latter being the most important, if you can believe it).
Continuing their raid, they break into a separate building to find a second "vivisectorium" like the one the Surgeon used in his first scene, only this time it's Honan on the slab. As flaccid a character as he was, I can actually feel sorry for him here; but then, something like this is gruesome, graphic and presented pitifully enough that it could be any nameless extra and it'd evoke a reaction. And feeling pity is not really the same thing as caring about the character; as nightmarish as this must be for Honan, I don't think it's done anything to make him less of a prick or more of a meaningful character. Lacking either of those benefits, I can only call the scene manipulative.
The Ultramarines take mortal offense at the entire affair, and after ceremonially euthanizing Honan proceed to cut loose on the place with bolter fire until everything is in shreds.

As an added note, I really think this scene would have been more effective if we hadn't had one a lot like it earlier. An image like this one is powerful, but we've already seen the whole dissection shpiel earlier, and while this one has a different tone behind it, using it more than once in the same story cheapens it as a dramatic device.

At this point, Kasimir's motorcade is headed out of town towards his spaceship, along with the sexy wych, Kesharq and the Surgeon. This tells us the story is almost over and the Grand Scheme is about to go into motion. Uriel and company, not realizing quite what's happening, go back to the ship to pontificate. After discussing the matter for a bit, a miraculous hint occurs to Uriel in the form of the label on the batteries the Necron warriors were hooked up to, which turns out to be the name of a certain mine. Absolutely convinced that this vague hunch will lead them to victory, the Fourth Company prepare once more to deploy.

Meanwhile in town, the Arbites are still in trouble and the Ultramarines are still hunting the rebels who triggered the riots in the first place.
Amel Vedden, their leader, is a character who seems to exist for no reason other than to give a bad face to the PDF rebels. He's crass, murderous and not especially smart. In the few scenes we see him, he's either mumbling to himself about how awesome rebelling against the government is, or salivating over killing helpless people. Reasonably, the PDF should be composed of unique individuals who share similar but certainly not identical views and have their own motivations for participating in the rebellion.
However, 40K has the tendency to reduce masses of people to carbon copies of their representatives; we get the impression that Amel Vedden is not just the face of the PDF, he is the PDF, and everyone else in it is just him copied over a few million times. This makes everything quite cut and dried, and leaves very little room for complex characterization, and what's worse, that was probably the whole point.

Virgil Ortega basically destroys the capital city to stop some rebels from getting guns, even though they all have guns and worse already. Maybe it would have given them enough power to take over the city, but would that be worse than destroying it? Well, given that in this same story, Barzano was advocating destroying the entire planet just to make sure Kasimir and his coterie couldn't get to the Nightbringer...

Planetary destruction makes me tired; I just don't have the mental fortitude to comprehend it without savagely trivializing everything on and in it, which is probably a mercy. At the same time, that's probably at least one of the perspectives from which we're intended to view it.

Kasimir's headed off to the convenient Final Boss chamber at the excavation site, along with his coterie, including an increasingly annoyed Kesharq and his daemon chihuahas, plus the sexy, sexy mute wych. There's some non-witty banter and fawning over the Great and Terrible Power they're about to Unleash, which is a good indicator they're all going to die. Out in the tunnels there's some more fighting and "suspense" via Uriel et al having a brief but violent fugue caused by the awakening Nightbringer. At any rate, they eventually get to the chamber and commense the final showdown.

I'll be frank; the titular Nightbringer itself looks like something out of Kingdom Hearts. While not a bad thing in and of itself, it clashes a bit with the intended effect of an ancient god foreshadowing inexorable doom. The thing starts swinging its scythe-arm and a bunch of Ultramarines die. Some Necrons wake up and join the fight. Dark Eldar join in. Kesharq gets killed. The wych gets vaporized. They try to fight back while avoiding the Nightbringer, but they're being tossed around like rag dolls. While all that's going on, Kasimir tries to finagle immortality out of the Nightbringer and is promptly eaten alive.

Show of hands; how many people saw that coming?

So they fight some more. Pasanius gets his arm sliced off, Uriel gets his ass beat, and finally with some psychic contrivance from Barzano, they finally realize that the artifacty thing in the center of the dark mass is what they need to go after. Uriel does so, grabbing it with some effort, slapping a Melta bomb to it and threatening to destroy it. The Nightbringer is somehow put off by this, flying up through the ceiling and disappearing. I guess he couldn't bear the sight of someone threatening what amounted to his car keys.

The entire Nightbringer battle-- and indeed, the C'tan itself-- just reeks of thoughtlessness. It's a god that gets intimidated by a human being under threat of being buried under ten kilometers of rock, then effortlessly flees seventy thousand light years. It gets more energy from a few people's feelings than from sucking the life from the sun. It longs to have the power of its starship, which is depicted only as a device through which it can feed on stars, but then it goes ahead and feeds on stars anyway. It's sealed underground and able to leach energy from its surroundings long before being released, and yet is in a highly weakened state when fully awakened-- at least that's what Uriel says; the thing seems pretty capable of taking care of itself.

In the end, Brandon Gate has been reduced to crap on toast. The city is rubble, the army and police have been wiped out, the cartels are in shambles with most of their holdings destroyed and without leadership of any kind, and virtually every named character is dead except the three main Ultramarines and the governor.

Praise the Emperor.

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With the summary out of the way, let's tackle the concepts.

The concept of "plot armor" becomes especially blatant when used in novels like these. Warhammer 40,000 is a setting where truly massive numbers of people die all the time, often on a planetary or even solar system-ary scale, without respect to station, rank or merit; death is the great equalizer. In Nightbringer, characters like Uriel, Learchus and Pasanius seem to survive even the cruelest onslaughts. And it's not just Space Marines; even the planetary governer-- a grey-haired woman with no combat training at all-- lives through the entire war event on Pavonis. Okay, so Pasanius wound up losing an arm to the Nightbringer and now he's got a bionic one, but it's not like it's even disadvantage.
While it's an obvious gimmick, it's also a necessary one; in order to tell these stories in any meaningful, relatable (and profitable) way, things have to be lightened a shade or three. Characters have to survive so we can get to know them, and the normally random, uncaring universe has to behave somewhat purposefully in order for there to be anything like drama.

A "true" 40K novel-- one that proposed to adhere to the spirit of the setting material in its purest form with the greatest of summary precision-- would be virtually nothing but long, nightmarishly bloody combat on an incomprehensibly vast scale, with no characters, no plotline and an ending where everyone dies for nothing since none of it really matters on the large scale anyway. While this book would capture the essence of things well enough (certainly better than Nightbringer does), it would be a damned depressing read; it'd be like reading the phone book, in the knowledge that every single person in it had just been senselessly murdered in cold blood the second your eyes passed their name.

Nightbringer, attempts to bring together a sizable cast of largely disposable characters to face an unknown enemy with unclear goals, coordinating the revival of an abstract evil with vague intentions.
When I first got my hands on the book, I actually had slightly higher-than-normal expectations, since I tend to associate 40K with quality-- but I think that's because I garner so much of my impression of 40K from the great abundance of artwork, which is almost universally brilliant. I was prepared to like it, and I think I did, at least for the first while; once it all began to come into perspective, it decayed from good to mediocre to bad to really awful.
You see, the problem is that this book has nothing to say. It's not making a point of any kind; it's pointless. There are bad people doing bad things, and some slightly less bad people are out to stop them. There's no objective reason to care who wins, nothing to truly separate good guys from bad. There's some attempt to appeal to the common conceptions of right and wrong-- generally measured by how much the character enjoys the inevitable killing-- but it's drowned out by the factions' own prejudice. The only way I know how to invest in it is by just picking a side based on how much I like their themes and designs-- much as one would do with the wargame, I imagine. The novel functions not unlike a football game on that level, only with an outer layer of "normal" moralization attempting to make an otherwise intolerable universe palatable for a mainstream audience.

In brief, the book was pointless, shoddy, lame and reliant on shock value to function.

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This concludes the Nightbringer review. My sincere thanks go out to everyone who's taken the time to comment on my blog (all three of you); your time and attention are appreciated.

Next in the series is Warriors of Ultramar, but that's another post.